MULTI-RADAR MULTI-TARGET TRACKING IN THE CONTEXT OF COOPERATIVE MARITIME TRAFFIC SITUATION ASSESSMENT

A reliable and complete traffic situation picture can be understood as key requirement for safe and collision free navigation at sea. Various sensor data is already collected and processed on-board a vessel or ashore. With the introduction of new high-bandwidth marine data channels it becomes possible to share this data among different vessels to assess the current traffic situation cooperatively close to real-time. By exploiting the diversity and redundancy of the data a refined and more reliable traffic situation picture is expected to be obtained. In this work we will demonstrate the benefits of such an approach in a dynamic multi-radar, multi-target setup. Within overlapping areas of radar coverage, the uncertainty of detected objects is greatly decreased. Next to radar the AIS has significantly improved the maritime traffic situation assessment over the past years. However, it is still error-prone and vulnerable to threats like AIS spoofing or other intentional misuse. Fusing AIS with a standalone radar already yields a more complete and robust situation picture in the vicinity of a vessel. This will be extended in the proposed system architecture fusing data from multiple radars prior to multi-target tracking in an IMMJPDA filter. Based on a dedicated measurement campaign in the Baltic Sea the proposed algorithm for distributed sensor fusion and target tracking will be evaluated